Food & Wine

Celebrity Chefs and Their Cooking Habits

It’s likely that most people who love food have watched celebrity chefs create masterpieces on The Food Network at some point. They could be an experienced chef, a novice baker, or just a casual cooker who aims to feed themselves with a simple meal. Whatever their cooking goals may be, it’s always great to get cooking inspiration from the pros on The Food Network.

If you’re familiar with Food Network stars such as Ina Garten, Ree Drummond, and Rachael Ray, you may also be interested in a breakdown of their recipes. Empire Today recently analyzed a ton of recipes online — and by a ton, we mean over 1,300 recipes — to see what the most common ingredients, methods, and instructions are. To learn more about some of your celebrity chefs, keep reading.

Ina Garten, who is also known as The Barefoot Contessa, has the most recipes listed on The Food Network website. Out of her 221 recipes, it’s unsurprising that the most common ingredients used are salt and pepper; and that goes for most of the other celebrity chefs as well. But besides salt and pepper, her third most used ingredient is olive oil. If you’re a fan of Ina Garten, you probably know that she often calls for “a good olive oil.” What that means, it’s hard to tell, but it’s probably good to follow her advice.

Besides the abundance of salt and pepper lovers, there are a few celebrity chefs whose most used ingredients are something else. Trisha Yearwood has a love of butter, as nearly 6% of her 70 recipes call for butter. Sandra Lee’s most used ingredient is a good onion, which never fails to add some flavor to any cooking recipe.

In addition to the most commonly used ingredients, the analysis also found the most common recipe category for each celebrity chef. Giada De Laurentiis, who was originally born in Rome, Italy, has half of her recipes being listed as Italian. Chefs such as Alton Brown, Katie Lee, Jeff Mauro, and Melissa Darabian all have gluten-free making up the majority of their recipes posted online. Other categories include vegetable dishes, easy dishes, desserts, and more.

When it comes to the actual quality and excitement around the recipes of celebrity chefs, the analysis did not fail to deliver. Nancy Fuller has the highest average rating of her recipes with a perfect five stars. Other chefs who had high average ratings include Jamie Deen (4.99), Katie Lee (4.94), Alton Brown (4.91), and Ree Drummond (4.87). The chef with the lowest user ratings on average is Robert Irvine, whose recipe reviews accumulated just 3.74 stars out of 5.

While not the highest rated celebrity chef in terms of average rating, Ina Garten has the most reviews with over 40,200 reviews on her recipes. Giada De Laurentiis has the second-most number of reviews — however, her 23,351 reviews are nothing in comparison to the number of Ina Garten’s reviews.

If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the analysis, you can find it through the link mentioned above. Other insights they found about celebrity chefs include the most popular type of meat used, the most common terms, and random statistics such as total cook times, average temperatures, and more.